What The Left Misses About Trump's Appeal

It's the culture, stupid

Donald Trump has been the main character of American politics for the past ten years, and progressives are still baffled by his popularity. How can millions of Americans support someone so brazenly corrupt, so eager to flout constitutional principles, so…unburdened by knowledge?

Conventional wisdom holds that Trump won a second term mainly because voters were upset about inflation, joining a global revolt against incumbent parties on both the left and the right. This explanation is correct yet misses something. While economic anxiety can readily boost conventional politicians, how could it have overcome Trump’s extraordinary and gratuitous flaws?

Let’s be precise. The mystery isn’t just 2024—it’s the last decade, it’s his enduring mass appeal, it’s that any of the last three elections were even close. Each cycle, his coalition has become racially more diverse, gaining Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters. This isn’t just white identity politics. Something else is at play, but what?

Misinformation is a comforting story—voters would have naturally preferred Democrats but were duped by fake news and propaganda. The latest cope is that Trump is successful because he masterfully commands attention. But since when does negative attention help politicians rather than hurt them?

Progressives can’t understand how a clear view of Trump could inspire anything but disgust. This is simply a failure of imagination, one that stems from the deepening segregation between political tribes. Most progressives know few if any Trump supporters as friends, neighbors, or colleagues. If they did, they’d be forced to grapple with an unnerving truth: that people they respect could know what Trump is and vote for him anyway.

What progressives fail to see in all of this is themselves.

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The obscene cult of personality surrounding Trump is so disturbing that outsiders miss how common negative partisanship is among conservatives. Just as millions of progressives held their noses and voted for Biden or Harris primarily out of opposition to Trump, millions of Americans voted for Trump because of their distaste for Democrats and progressive culture more broadly.

Negative partisanship hasn’t just driven people away from Democrats, it has also led some Americans to embrace Trump. In time, the enemy of your enemy will become your friend. To many people, Trump has become a symbol of resistance—not just to progressive policies but also to progressive hegemony over mainstream cultural institutions like media, academia, and corporations.

Yet why would millions of Americans see progressives as enemies?

Social media amplifies the worst impulses on the left, but even without algorithmic distortion the picture is damning. Over the past 15 years, progressives have advocated for ideas that are anathema to most people, such as defunding the police, abolishing prisons, tolerance toward petty crime, lax border enforcement, censorship of alternative viewpoints, economic degrowth, and climate austerity. We can debate the merits of these positions, but that’s separate from how voters see them.

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“Hang on, if you’re trying to explain the presidential election you should look at Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. Both tacked toward the center. They weren’t too progressive!”

Harris, it’s true, was a remarkably weak candidate—as everyone recognized during the 2020 primaries but somehow forgot in the 2024 glee that someone—anyone with a pulse—was replacing Biden, enfeebled and crashing in popularity. But Harris and her party were so lacking in any positive vision that the public used progressive culture to fill in the blanks. More generally, politicians are held responsible for the views of their coalition partners, especially when they’ve endorsed those views in the past. But this trend isn’t specific to Harris, and as Musa Al-Gharbi argues it’s much older than 2024.

Historically, Democrats have relied on an alliance between progressives and people of color representing a wide range of political identities. Increasingly, however, progressive policies taken seriously by Democrats repel conservative and moderate people of color.

These policies also hit working class people hardest. For example, most people who want to defund or abolish the police (rather than reform them) would suffer little from the higher rates of crime that would ensue. Once favored by voters with low income and low education, Democrats are now the party of wealthy, credentialed elites.

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Another reason that many Americans see progressives as enemies is that moral condemnation and social censure regularly take the place of counter-arguments on the left. Language policing seems noble but is actually just classist. Not having mastered the latest academic code words does not make you a bigot.

Stop blaming voters. Trump won because progressives failed to offer a more persuasive alternative.

The root cause of this failure is intellectual tribalism, something I described in another essay:

We take shelter in our caves, finding warmth in our shared convictions, while disagreement howls beyond our walls. Captives of groupthink, our political tribe does our thinking for us, rewards conformity, and censures those who fail tests of moral purity. At the same time, we regard the barbarians outside the gates with suspicion and scorn.

Because progressives are censorious and on the wrong side of many prominent political disputes, their place in popular culture has shifted. The vibes are off. In the Obama era, progressives ruled social media. These days, in a new media ecosystem without traditional gatekeepers—on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch—right-leaning influencers draw far bigger audiences.

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This is, in technical terms, a huge fucking problem. Right-wing media dominance is poised to shape cultural and political evolution far beyond Trump. One of the most troubling trends in 2024 is that politically-disengaged Americans and young voters swung toward Trump, and they’ll continue to turn away from progressives unless something changes.

Make no mistake, Trump’s rule is infinitely more harmful than the most extreme progressive policies. Look at 2025 alone. Trump cancelled USAID programs that save millions of lives in the developing world, hobbled US biomedical research, and deported non-citizens who criticized Israel. His tariffs are threatening to crash the global economy because he thinks it’s bad for the country to buy more products than it sells (🤦‍♂️). None of this is as bad as his attacks on democracy and the rule of law.

We’re three months in.

Trump’s second term makes it even harder for progressives to understand his broad appeal. I’m not trying to give a comprehensive explanation here (go read Dan Williams’ excellent recent essay). Many factors are at play, not least of all that Trump has exploited the threat that many working class and xenophobic voters perceive in globalization. They see Trump, whatever his flaws, as on their side. To some, Trump’s style matters far more than the substance of his policies. He’s authentic in a way that hardly any politicians are (perhaps only Bernie and AOC on the left). He says what he thinks, he’s not afraid to violate conventional norms, and his way of talking resonates with ordinary Americans.

But another factor is that many Americans are repulsed by progressive culture. What lessons can we draw from this about the future of electoral politics?

This isn’t primarily about 2028. The next election will hinge largely on other forces. Trump will provoke backlash by making poor decisions—like his tariff policies—and Republicans in Congress will begin fearing voters more than they fear Trump (🤞). Opponents should raise the salience of issues where the public opposes him (not immigration, unfortunately). As in 2024, as always, economic conditions unrelated to governance will sway fickle voters in one direction or another.

The future beyond 2028 is a different story. As a progressive, I want us to avoid alienating normie voters and renew our long-term electoral prospects. To do that, we must fix our broken culture.

The answer is not to throw people who are trans, or Black, or otherwise marginalized under the bus. We should abandon unworthy ideas that serve only elites and their internal status competitions. We should pursue reforms that genuinely advance well-being, freedom, and social equality—including progressive causes that Americans favored even while voting for Trump, like minimum wage hikes, sick leave mandates, and reproductive rights. We should recover open-mindedness and tolerance. Progressive culture will evolve only if we do.

And why not? Our core values needn’t change. The only thing we have to lose is undesirable cultural baggage.